Microarray Analysis Of Nitric Oxide Responsive Genes In Arabidopsis

Nitric oxide (NO) is one of the important signal molecules in plantsand plays an important role in biological and abiotic stress(such asdrought, UV-B, salt stress, high temperature, etc.), programmed celldeath (PCD), respiration, light morphogenesis, fruit ripening, leafstretching, stomatal closure, aging, seed germination, floweringregulation, root development and hormonal response, etc. Soresearching the role of NO in genetic and molecular mechanism hasimportant theoretical significance and potential application value inplants, and it is currently one of the hot issues in the field of plantmolecular biology research. To find out the molecular mechanism ofplant physiological processes and functions adjusted by NO, the keyis to analyze the NO regulation mechanism of gene expression. Theanalysis of the genome-wide transcription under the changes of NOcontent in plants is a kind of effective method to analyze the NOregulation mechanism of gene expression.This study used Arabidopsis thaliana as the research object.Materials used in the experiment with wild-type Arabidopsis thaliana(WT), the mutant nox1(endogenous NO content increased), mutantnoa1(endogenous NO content reduced). Used the Arabidopsis ATH1 genome-wide chip (Arabidopsis ATH1-121501Genome Array) ofAffymetrix company for hybridization experiments, and got the geneexpression profiles of WT, nox1and noa1, then screened thedifferentially expressed genes. DNA-microarray results showed that:nox1mutant compared with WT, nox1had532up-regulated genes,there were120raised obviously, illustrated that the expression ofthese genes could be induced by NO, nox1had130down-regulatedgenes, including16genes expression significantly lowered,illustrated that the expression of these genes could be inhibited byNO; noa1mutant compared with WT, there was one down-regulatedgene and no up-regulated gene, illustrated that the reduction of NOcontent in plant had no significant influence on gene expression.Retrieved the relevant information of differentially expressed geneson TAIR and NCBI website, and used the GO functional annotations toclassify the differentially expressed genes. Preliminary analysisfound NO influenced the gene expression mainly in the metabolismrelated genes, photosynthesis related genes, the related genes offunctional protein involved in plant stress response, signaltransduction pathways regulating protein gene, etc. Used the KEGGwebsite to analyze pathway. The results showed that NO majorinduced lignin biosynthesis, linolenic acid metabolism, limonenedegradation, valine degradation, leucine degradation, tryptophandegradation, and suppressed the biosynthesis of ammonia acyl tRNA,valine, leucine, isoleucine.This paper used the DNA-microarray technology to research theinfluence of gene expression profile with NO content in Arabidopsisthaliana, and preliminary discussed the molecular mechanisms of interactions between plant hormones (such as ethylene, gibberellin,abscisic acid) and NO. Further research will be expected to unveil therole of NO in plant mechanism.